This site is a collection of personal musings and other tidbits intended to record my own thoughts arising from the enjoyment of wine and wine-related occasions. It is not a source of ratings or comparisons or other ways of telling you what you should drink since, to me, that is an entirely personal decision. Instead, it is more about life in relationship to wine and thus more about people, philosophy, anthropology, and the like than it is about wine itself, although, of course, many of the musings will be about the perception of wine and what makes it memorable and enjoyable.

I recently discovered that this site had been bombarded with a huge amount of spam. As a result, I have deleted all the spam and almost all of the comments. It is quite possible I deleted something that was not spam, but there was just too much to go through very carefully. I have also deleted virtually all of the users, since most of the users were clearly there only to post spam. It is quite likely I deleted some legitimate people in the process, but again, there were just too many to investigate very carefully.

I also have changed the registration policy, unfortunately, so that anyone who would like to post here is going to have to write me in advance at thomas at a-muse-in-the-cellar dot com so that I can create an account. If there is more interest in posting, I will revisit this policy later, but for now it has to be my first line of defense.

This is just a placeholder for now. Eventually, I will create entries for some of my historical mailing list posts and then, hopefully, add to them as time goes on.

Note
There is quite a bit of backlog and a bunch of new material I will be creating for the site, so, if you stumble on the site until I get a chance to deal with all that, be patient. When the backlog has been cleared, I will send out a notice to the old list.

I had the 1994 Niebaum-Coppola Claret last night -- a pretty good $13 bottle, all things considered -- and in the process clarified some of my thoughts about what it is that I am looking for in wines these days. The quality that I think I am looking for is the ability of the wine to hold my attention. This is not any one aspect of the wine and has only a bit to do with the strictly technical merits of the wine, much like it does in music.

For some years I have posted occasional remarks about wine to a small list of readers. My intention wasn't to tell anyone what to drink, but simply to share thoughts ... musings, if you will ... occasioned by wine or associated with wine people or wine events. Recently, I finally got around to building this website, so I am going to collect a few of the historical posts here on the chance they might amuse someone else.